TODAY: In 1925, Mexican poet and author Rosario Castellanos is born.
- “Men still too often see their writing as canon.” David Hayden pays homage to the women who influenced his writing. | Lit Hub
- Man Booker International prize-winner Jennifer Croft (who won alongside the writer she translated, Olga Tokarczuk) has some strong feelingsabout who’s going to win next year’s prize… Hint: she’s interviewed all of Virginie Despentes’s translators. | Lit Hub
- A visit to Prince’s once-mysterious Paisley Park. | Lit Hub
- “I needed help with the existential terror of my own death and responsibility for the death of others, enemies and friends, not Southern Comfort.” Karl Marlantes reminds us of the point of Memorial Day. | Lit Hub
- From Aja Gabel’s debut novel to Michael Pollan’s acid trips, the 10 best reviewed books of the week. | Book Marks
- “Above all, libraries should be open, and free, and properly subsidized by an intelligent state that values knowledge.” A selection of Hay Festival speakers, from Philip Pullman to Chelsea Clinton, on the importance of libraries. | The Times Literary Supplement
- Katrina Dodson on translating Clarice Lispector, which “sometimes felt like a mystical journey, or at the very least a vision quest in which her sentences rose up like feral hallucinations as I groped at their meaning.” | The Believer
- Porochista Khakpour has launched a new digital zine “for writers to explore topics outside of their typical beat,” including Esmé Weijun Wang on magic tricks and Keah Brown on Grey’s Anatomy. | Medium
- “Literary culture has long been complicit in upholding the structures by which we imagine men to be more worthy of attention and thus more human.” On our canon of sad white men’s literature and the rise of the incel movement. | Electric Literature
- It’s official: Lauren Groff has given the best “By the Book” interview in recent memory. | The New York TImes Book Review
- Researches at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital used an FMRI machine to find out what happens inside children’s brains when you read them a story, show them a cartoon, or play an audiobook. | NPR
- “I’m not sure why I have a desire to write things, but it makes me feel more human than any other thing has thus far in my life.” An interview with Rita Bullwinkel. | The Paris Review
